Tube Vs. SS Preamps

@jffyg     ”I am going to chime in here and then everyone can attack me. I think that many lesser priced tube based designs can be very musical and soft sounding which compliments many lesser expensive ss designed amps…”

Nothing to attack, it’s a generality. I agree with your assessment. I have swapped a lot of less expensive equipment in my headphone system and early on in my main system. Your assessment is good.

[@jiffyg] I am going to chime in here and then everyone can attack me. I think that many lesser priced tube based designs can be very musical and soft sounding which compliments many lesser expensive ss designed amps. So on the more affordable side of things I believe that tubed equipment sounds pleasing, maybe not super revealing or hyper accurate, but very pleasing. Obviously as the price goes up and the true art and science of sound reproduction is achieved both solid state and tubed designs both hit all the stops, sound stage, intimacy, immediacy and revealing of source information.

At least you know what you like and can obtain it.  Some don't know, and drive themselves nuts rotating one piece of gear to the next never finding what they like.  

In a similar fashion to your findings there can be what I think of as the "golden era" sound to some older tube amps and older receivers, integrated, preamps with old caps and old carbon resistors and such that can be enjoyable to listen to.

Recently helping a friend on his highly modified "lesser cost" Jolida integrated tube amplifier, with old vintage input/driver tubes and newer PSVANE KT88s mixed with some decent interconnect and speaker cables we hit on the same sound you refer to. It's quite musical to listen to, and his total amp investment is about half cost of comparable amps with equal or less musicality. It can be achieved, to your point.   

SPL Elector is a solid state preamp that does a nice job of mimicking an excellent tube preamp.  Beautiful, airy, textured sound with great tone colors.  Also, clear as a bell...

let’s diaggregate a little

lesser/older tube gear provides

1. rolled off treble
2. little to no deep bass, poor bass damping
3. enriched/expanded midrange and midbass
4. lower sense of drive and rhythm and attack when needed
5. improved imaging and sense of natural ’decay’ on notes (think piano natural reverb)
6. reduced sense of grain and grit in treble and mids (pleasant smoothing effect)

@jjss49 

The H/K Citation 1 preamp has bandwidth to over 100KHz. Properly refurbished they give many high end preamps a run for the money. Its real weakness is the phono section won't do LOMC cartridges. H/K was good about bandwidth in their power amps as well (the Citation 5 had bandwidth to 100KHz as well) since Stuart Hegeman (the designer) was a big advocate of wide bandwidth and low impedance power supplies. Your characterization of older equipment isn't entirely accurate.

ralph - first of all happy holidays to you and yours 🎄🎄🎄

re your comment, i never had the pleasure of having citation gear back in the day, am sure they were wide bandwidth as you say ... my thoughts were based on my own, generalized experiences in the late 80’s, 90’s, 00’s using/trying tube pre’s from cj, macintosh, dynaco, cary/dennis had and arc...